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To drive success, IT strategy and business goals must align

By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances –

Business success today is largely driven by the efforts of the IT department. So much of what is needed to make decisions at the highest levels of the executive chain – namely, data and analytics – depends on the IT team’s ability to deliver the necessary data to the right parties in a timely fashion. As our own chief information officer (CIO) Mike Moore recently noted, as IT begins playing more of an advisory role, IT teams have greater responsibility to align their strategies with overall business goals than ever before.

IT’s data drives decisions across executive functions

For example, if you’re a chief marketing officer (CMO), your decisions hinge on having the right data about your audiences.

What are your customers looking for from your products or services?

What is the feedback customers give to your service reps?

How can the product or service be improved to increase repeat purchases or customer loyalty scores?

Organizations everywhere are seeing alignments between the CMO and the CIO in a way that didn’t exist 10 years ago, because the CMO and other functions within marketing are relying on technology like never before. The emergence of SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, has made CIO support an integral piece of marketing success. CIOs and their teams are now providing the big data and analytics needed to drive executive decision-making.

The IT mechanism to guide business decisions goes beyond big data. IT is responsible for not just reporting and analytics, but also privacy and protection; governance, risk and compliance; and backup and recovery, as well. These areas have huge implications for businesses well beyond the IT realm. This concept is behind the latest Virtual Instruments partnership with Mainline Information Systems, a national IT solutions and consulting firm.

In the words of Mainline account executive John Boyle, “If you can’t talk about what you’re doing inside of an organization in the context of how it’s delivering value, you’re dead.” This statement has never been truer for IT professionals than it is today – by aligning the IT strategy with business goals, IT teams can build relevance and value for the organization as a whole. The team at Mainline works as strategic partners to businesses, providing IT assessments, technology implementations and ongoing managed services to their customers. Through its services, Mainline helps companies identify the business needs of the organization and how the IT department can support the mission, even when dealing with legacy infrastructure and needed upgrades.

To support its mission, Mainline chose Virtual Instruments to provide holistic insight into infrastructure performance. When it comes to evaluating and enhancing a customer’s IT systems, Mainline relies on VirtualWisdom to identify and diagnose performance problems in the infrastructure across legacy or heterogeneous data centers. The synergy between Virtual Instruments and Mainline gives an end-to-end view of the IT operations, allowing companies to increase performance, optimizing the ability to process big data and turn it into valuable business analytics.